“the raw material which the law took up and shifted, rearranged, justified, and embodied as the legal practice. The law itself did not create. The people created and the law organized.”
[n modern times, too, argues Freehof , historical change has necessitated a religious revolution in Judaism . Emancipation, the end of Jewish corporate existence, destroyed the community for which Jewish law was developed and intended. In the modern world most Jews ignore most of Jewish law, and even“the small percentage who still observe the dietary laws, the Sabbath and Jewish marriage laws, even for them, loyal, self-sacrificing Ortho dox Jews in a bewildering modern world, the whole Jewish civil law code, the Choshen Mishpot, no longer exists.”'? Once again, the people’s creativity is stepping into the breach, creating new minhagim. Reform Judaism is the oldest of such coping attempts and it has succeeded in retaining many Jews within Judaism for several generations. In Reform Judaism ,
[t]he rabbis have expressed certain principles, certain theological ideals, but the people by themselves by their rejections and their acceptances, by their neglects and their observances have largely determined their own religious practices. Reform Jewish practice is not fixed. It is still changing. But by this time it has fairly well crystallized. It has arrived for the present at least at a definite form. It must therefore be of interest to all who are concerned with the problem of the adjustment of Jewish life to the modern world to study how this group of Jews has adjusted itself."
Freehof will therefore describe contemporary Reform practice in his book and, wherever applicable, illustrate its roots in older Jewish practice. He notes, however, that he will include
[o]nly those traditional laws and customs... which are connected with actual prevalent Reform practice. Thus, those branches of traditional law which have left very little mark upon present-day life of the Reform Jew are not dealt with. To put it bluntly, there is, unfortunately, as little observance of the dietary laws among Reform Jews as there is among millions of other modern Jews and also as little observance of the traditional laws of Sabbath rest. Hence, these branches of Orthodox law are not dealt with.